s meant entire self-abandonment, the utter giving up of
ourselves to Christ. To have faith into Christ is the perfect expression
of discipleship. It is the supreme act of self-surrender by which a man
takes Christ henceforth to be the Lord and Master of his life. It
implies, no doubt, the existence of certain intellectual convictions; but
the faith which rests there is, as St. James tells us, the faith of the
demons "who also tremble." In the full sense, faith is an act of the
whole personal being. And as the will is our personality in action, we
may say that faith into Christ is, above all, an affair of the will.

But thus to surrender oneself to Christ, to make Him, and not self, the
centre and governing principle of our life is, in other words, to make
His Will our will, His Mind our mind. St. Paul is exactly describing the
full fruition and final issue of faith when he says of himself, "I live,
yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me."

Faith _is_ self-identification with the Mind of Christ. And that Mind is
the Mind of Him Who died to sin, Who by dying repudiated sin, and
revealed His implacable hatred of and hostility to it, which is the
hatred and hostility of God, in our manhood, to the moral evil which
destroys it.

Thus the man, who, by the supreme act of faith into Christ, has made
Christ's Mind his own mind, has thereby gained the changed mind, the
[Greek text], in regard to sin, which is the ceasing to be the object of
God's wrath, because it is the being identified with it. He is,
henceforth, reconciled to God. The state of alienation and death is
over. In Christ he, too, has died to sin. The false self, in him, has
been put to death. With Christ he has been crucified. With Christ he
lives henceforth to God, in that union and fellowship with Him, which is
the life eternal, the life which is life indeed. His true self, the
Christ in him, is alive for evermore in the power of the Resurrection.

That is the final issue, the glorious consummation, of faith. But so far
as faith is in us at all, so far as daily with more complete surrender we
give ourselves to Christ, and take Him for our Lord and Master, the
process, of which the fulfilment, the perfect end, is reconciliation,
union, resurrection, eternal life, has begun in us. And He Who has,
visibly and manifestly, "begun in us" that "good work," will assuredly
"accomplish it until the day of Jesus Christ."

But something more yet remains